CPAC muddle mirrors GOP mess

It’s not hard to make fun of CPAC. From the presence of Donald Trump to a meaningless straw poll to a cavalcade of fringe-dwelling book merchants, the event has become more carnival than conservative salon.

What is more notable about this year’s rendition of the annual confab, which begins outside Washington on Thursday, is not the easy caricature but how thoroughly the Conservative Political Action Conference reflects the state of the Republican Party four months after yet another humbling presidential defeat. It is a muddle, but a muddle with meaning.

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Establishment Republicans are angry that popular GOP governors Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are being snubbed, but conservatives, seeing Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush invited, are moaning that a traditional movement event has been annexed by the country club crowd.

Future Republican bright lights will be in attendance, but so will yesterday’s news, most of it with headlines no one wants to read.

A Republican gay group isn’t welcome yet neither are hard-liners on immigration.

And another member of the Paul family is poised, to the frustration of organizers, to again win the presidential straw poll.

For decades, perhaps even for a century now, Republicans have grappled with their moderate-conservative divide. But as the CPAC jumble illustrates, the confusion surrounding the party is now more complex than the enduring center vs. right paradigm.

“We all need to be singing from same hymnal,” cautions former Mississippi governor and Clinton-era Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour. “When the other side has the megaphone of the White House, it makes it all the more important that your side sticks together on message and has more message discipline. We have to have moderate Republicans, conservative Republicans, neo-con Republicans, tea party people all saying, ‘Here are the thing we agree on and that we should emphasize.’”

But as CPAC gets under way, it’s the differences that are coming into stark relief. The gathering has long been seen as an early indicator about the state of conservatives and that’s no different today. But unfortunately for the right, it’s the GOP’s identity crisis that now’s being reflected by CPAC.

And it’s a dark night of the soul that’s been building for years. Each of the three legs of Ronald Reagan’s venerated Republican stool has gone wobbly in the wake of consecutive White House defeats, as the party grapples with both a core constituency that’s increasingly at odds with public opinion and the legacy of its most recentpresident.

The pillars of the conservative era ushered in by Reagan — a muscular defense, traditional cultural values and devotion to free markets – are being questioned by leading Republicans, and what could take the place of the Gipper’s trinity is now being openly debated in a fashion more reminiscent of the famously fractious Democrats of yore.

Republican leaders are questioning the interventionist foreign policy that President George W. Bush and the party’s last two nominees paid obeisance to; party elites are urging a more tolerant or even supportive stance on gay rights and would be just fine if abortion wasn’t discussed at all; and while conservative thinkers muse about a harder line on Wall Street, many GOP governors are bowing to the greatest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society and their contemporaries in Congress, having just raised taxes at the start of the year, still entertain the possibility of more revenue increases in exchange for a fiscal grand bargain.

“We have to, as a Republican Party, get bigger, not smaller, and we’re a party that’s becoming more regionalized and I think a smaller, less significant national party,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, deadpanning: “We’re a great red state party.”

The way to compete in blue America, Paul said, is to embrace a more restrained foreign policy and take a federalist approach on values issues.

“If you want to get together a majority in California I think your only chance is to be more of a libertarian Republican,” said Paul, who is considering a presidential bid in 2016 and believes the views of his father, former congressman and long-shot presidential hopeful Ron Paul, are being vindicated. “So it’s funny that those who resisted the influence of libertarian Republicans from 2008 to 2012 – I think we’re smart to revisit that. When I talk to the national party I think they’re aware of that.”

But while Paul seeks to remake the GOP in his image, other party leaders, such as Barbour, hope to downplay differences and believe consensus is the only way to be relevant in the Obama era. Open internal warfare, this view goes, merely offers aid and comfort to the opposition. In other words, Republicans can’t even agree on whether they should litigate their disagreements.